


Vergoldet

by tentacledicks



Category: Original Work
Genre: Character doesn't realize they've been injured, Circumstances make it impossible to stop and immediately treat injury, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:08:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24150322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/pseuds/tentacledicks
Summary: It's been five years since the last time he saw Jean-Marie Fournier and five years since he was betrayed so thoroughly. Richard's reputation can't get any lower—he's lucky they still let him work in the field, so expecting to be near the action is a pipe dream. As long as he keeps his head down and stays diligent, he might someday salvage the remains of his pride.Then Jean-Marie walks into his life again and Richard's plans to keep his head down fall apart.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character, Spy/Enemy Spy
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24
Collections: Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	Vergoldet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



In the hazy golden light of the setting sun, Jean-Marie stretches up, the scar on his hip pulling as his skin slides over ribs. Like this, he’s perfect—hazel eyes bright orange, the divots of his muscles a deep blue in the shadowed interior of the bedroom, the silver of his necklace catching the sunlight and turning to copper. His teeth are so brilliantly white, even in this moment, and his fingers are so terribly elegant as they drag over the swell of Richard’s chest muscles.

“You think too much,” he says, his accent dipping and swaying in that curious way it had, just the barest hint of Parisian French curling around the words. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

“I haven’t,” Richard has to admit, because he’s been too caught up in the wonderful appreciation of art in front of him. In this tiny flat, deep in Drumul Taberei, it’s the closest they’ve ever been to safe. The closest they’ve ever been to secret. He relishes the chance to bask in that fact, to bask in the heat of Jean-Marie’s body pressed against his own, Jean-Marie’s clever hands and quick movements.

“Ah, but I forgive you,” Jean-Marie tells him, his voice so terribly fond despite it all. The sun catches his necklace again, burns into the dangerous combination of initials engraved on its otherwise unremarkable charm.

“Do you really?” He can’t resist the urge to sit up, to cup his hand over the dark stain of stubble on Jean-Marie’s jaw, to lean in until their lips are almost touching.

“Always,” Jean-Marie whispers, the curve of his smile like a promise.

In his dark hotel room, the sounds of Munich outside its walls, Richard wakes up bitter and angry at the lie. Predictably, even his dreams aren’t safe from betrayal.

The room is still dark, Munich’s weak sunrise not yet here and its snowy skies leaving the city dark, wet, and cold, but he rolls out of bed anyways. This is not his favorite city, but there is little of it to upset him—rather, the circumstances surrounding his assignment here govern his feelings towards it. Munich is not Berlin, where big things are happening. Munich is, as far as Germany is concerned, not a player. Worth keeping an eye on, yes. But the Bavarians still resent the rest of Germany, are fickle with their attentions despite a professed friendship with the Americans still running rampant in the city, and he is not here because he is well _liked_.

Not after the events in Bucharest. That he still has a job at all is probably the only luck he’ll have for years. If there’s a consideration to be had, it is that at least he cannot be blackmailed when his worst secrets are known by the rest of the intelligence community.

Richard is a subject of mockery, and the truth of that twists his expression into something ugly as he steps into the shower. Let them laugh, then. At least he has his own cleverness to rely on, even when others think him without it. If he were a simpleton as well as a fool, he wouldn’t be alive any longer.

The water is lukewarm at best. This is not a very good hotel.

In truth, Richard would not be in Munich at all, but his compatriot that was typically stationed here had been called away. To Berlin, of course. Everything of interest is happening in Berlin, if it’s not happening past the obfuscating curve of the Iron Curtain. With the understanding that the reassignment would be temporary, Richard hasn’t made motions to fully take over his operation; a short vacation would be fitting for the identity the previous man had been working under, and Richard’s skills were but rarely in the field of social mimicry anyways. He monitors the numbers stations, codes in directions for their members scattered throughout the continent as he receives them himself, and keeps an eye on the Americans.

They are allies, supposedly, but trusting their allies has never gone well for him. Richard trusts the Americans even less, knowing that his superiors are so fully opposed to the course of action they have set everyone on.

Thus, the event this evening. He dries his hair off with a thin towel as he considers the paperwork scattered across his rickety desk, a small frown curving his mouth down. Despite his fall from grace, he is given a certain amount of discretion in how he chooses to operate in Munich—especially given that he won’t be taking over permanently. Better for him to follow his gut and put himself where the action is happening. There’s little else he can achieve otherwise.

He spends the day going over the dossiers on the various officials who will be attending the banquet at the Neues Rathaus, German and otherwise. For all that it is without the excitement of Berlin, Munich is a silent power in its own right; Bavaria chafes against its past and its future, seethes with its own kind of unhappiness even as it buries its fingers deep into the politics of the region. More likely than not, his colleague will have a great deal of work to come back to once he’s done in Berlin, as whatever decisions are made there will have equally far-ranging effects. The least Richard can do is ease his way just a bit.

The information on his fellows in the field is less useful. Out of date, most likely, and unreliable at the best of times. Richard surely hasn’t been the only one hastily substituted in as agents with more firm knowledge of the status of things in Germany are moved back towards Berlin. He memorizes it anyways, files it away in the complex sorting system he developed years ago, cross referenced to those who he was already familiar with. The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure has someone new on the ground, a woman, and he cannot tell if he is relieved or irritated by that fact. They wouldn’t station him someplace that Jean-Marie was likely to be working in.

For understandable reasons.

That mixture of relief and irritation dogs his heels as he slips into the banquet that evening, his suit a match to the rest of the dignitaries mingling in its gorgeous gothic interiors. As he drifts through the crowd, his German just accented enough to place him as a nonlocal (but not so much that he is immediately noticed as foreign), he marks which individuals are unknown to him. More than expected, given the limited guest list, and that makes his eyebrows raise as he spots the distinctive cut of American suits. There shouldn’t be so many of them in Munich still.

He finds himself watching more closely, noting those the Americans talk to and those they avoid. There is a frisson of anxiety running through them and Richard overhears one asking roundabout questions about a briefcase. Not missing, the man assures the dignitary he’s speaking to, but misplaced at the moment, and if they spot it, could they tell him…?

Richard mulls that over, slips out of the crush of people and finds a small alcove to relax in, his fingers drifting towards the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. There’s a level of organization to the American unit that he finds suspicious. Clearly, they have a set of orders to carry out, and more clearly still, this is not the usual smattering of spies previously stationed here—not that Richard expected to have information on _all_ of them, allies or no, but this far exceeds even their estimates of the American operatives in Munich. They are here for a reason, and he needs to figure out why before their actions pull the rug out from under him.

A figure in a black suit cuts across his line of sight, a small legal case held in the shadow of his body. His eyes are vivid green in this lighting, and his hair is longer than it was, but Richard recognizes Jean-Marie in an instant, his whole body going rigid with the effort it takes to keep himself in check. The rage doesn’t surprise him, but the brief nostalgic longing that wants to drive him forward does. If he stops to think about it, he’ll lose his temper—but Jean-Marie hasn’t spotted him and the urge to do _something_ to return the insult is too strong for Richard to bear.

On nearly silent feet, he slips out of his alcove and strides after the Frenchman, already figuring out his escape route. In front of him, Jean-Marie tenses, his free hand going for the gun, but Richard remembers well the way he thinks and ducks around to his opposite side, snatching the briefcase out of his hand before breaking into a sprint. 

There are offices up on the top floor, and any number of them indistinguishable from the last. With the few seconds that surprise gives him, Richard finds one with a window and hides in it, shutting the door carefully before Jean-Marie can reach the top of the stairs. He has, at best, a few minutes before he’s found—by Jean-Marie most likely, but the Americans are equally likely. Given that this is probably the briefcase they were looking for, he suspects they will be hunting for it quite intently. He can’t have been the only one to see it in Jean-Marie’s hands.

The lock on it is a combination one but appears to have no punishment for inputting the wrong code. Even if it did, the light wear on three of the numbers on the dial is clue enough to the combination, and he has it open after only a moment.

He expects to find papers, of course, but the wide range of documents is puzzling. Three lists, a folder filled to the brim, and a small sheet of note paper with a series of dates and letter ciphers greet him. The first list is a number of townships past the Iron Curtain, some that he recognizes from his time in the field and some that he doesn’t, all of them within the old borders of Germany, while the second list is a series of lat long coordinates that he suspects are also beyond the purview of the West. Richard memorizes both, just in case, then turns his attention to the third list—on initial inspection, it’s gibberish, but when he flips through the folder, there appears to be some correlation to the contents of it. So. A cipher and a table of contents, all in one. No wonder the Americans were so frantic to get this back. But why…?

There isn’t time to examine them more closely. Richard snaps the briefcase shut, spinning the dials on the lock as he finds the latch for the window. The Neues Rathaus has enough elaborate decoration on its exterior that he can hide the briefcase for now and come back to retrieve it later; this office belongs to a minor aide, and he can easily manufacture a reason to sneak up here. Between a marble statue and the recess it’s tucked into, there’s a large enough gap for the briefcase to slide right in, so he secures it there and swings back into the office just as the door clicks open.

He flips the latch on the window locked again but not before Jean-Marie spots him. For an eternity that stretches in seconds, they stare at each other, Jean-Marie’s hazel eyes murky and his face as disgustingly handsome as Richard remembers it being.

“You—” Jean-Marie starts to say before the soft _pop_ of a weapon firing catches them both off guard. His hand flies up to the dart now sticking out of his neck, but he can do nothing to stop himself from stumbling, then falling.

And Richard can do nothing to stop the American from shooting him next.

* * *

In his memories, Jean-Marie wears his shirt and leans over him with a wicked glint in his eyes, free and easy in the privacy of this little flat. He’s leaner in the shoulder but of a height to match Richard, so the sleeves fit perfectly even though the chest of it hangs baggy around him. He looks young. He looks happy.

Jean-Marie is neither of those things when Richard finally peels his eyes open, struggling against the gritty weight of the sedatives trying to pull him back down again. They must have dosed him higher, or Jean-Marie has some sort of resistance, because the Frenchman is alert and staring balefully at the door to the small, concrete room they’ve been left in. His clothes are wrinkled, and his hair mussed, but otherwise he appears uninjured.

It doesn’t make Richard any happier to see it. He thinks Jean-Marie deserves a black eye at the very least, given everything.

With an inaudible groan, he sits upright, dragging a hand down his face and feeling the start of stubble across his jaw. He’s been relieved of his weapons, the pistol at his side and the knives strapped to his wrist and calf. Even his watch, which is annoying, as it was both expensive and absolutely useless for spywork other than its use for telling the time. His shoes remain, which is for the best, lockpicks buried somewhere under one of his soles. The interior lining of his suit jacket appears to be intact as well.

So. Without any weapons but his hands, though he had plenty left to him should he try to escape. Even the best sedative wouldn’t knock him out for more than a few hours, not without other ill side effects; the worst he has is a small headache and a nasty case of dry mouth. Somewhere in the mainland still, then, which means his money should be convertible and his papers would be accepted by most officials.

No way to ask if Jean-Marie fared quite as well, not without giving himself up. The muscle twitching in his jaw says he’s angry and trying to hide it, so Richard can’t assume anything yet. The Jean-Marie he knew would have money and identities sewn into his clothes too, but the Jean-Marie he knew would never have let himself be caught in the first place.

He had Richard for that.

The door slams open before Richard can trip down that bitter, unhappy road again, men with guns pushing forward and keeping their weapons trained on the both of them. Richard can’t help but snort, because he’s still half-drugged and certainly no threat to anyone, but he sees Jean-Marie arch an eyebrow and refrains from laughing any louder. It’s a good thing, because a second later the woman strides into the room.

Her hair is the violent, bloody red that can only come out of a bottle, cut short at her shoulders and permed like a starlet from a decade ago. Like the rest of the soldiers, she wears black, but rather than a uniform she wears a sharp-shouldered suit, black slacks falling far enough that they almost conceal the combat boots she’s wearing. An eyepatch cuts an ugly swath across her otherwise very pretty face, and her remaining eye is blue and cold, sizing him up and dismissing him in an instant. All of her attention is reserved for Jean-Marie, who stiffens in recognition and fury.

Lovely. This is bound to do _wonders_ for Richard’s reputation, he’s sure.

“Couldn’t run forever, could you, sugar?” she drawls, so painfully American that Richard is seized by the urge to laugh again.

Jean-Marie is not laughing. Jean-Marie is glaring with the sort of murderous rage that Richard has seen on his face only once, back when they’d first been working around each other in Bucharest, back before they’d been—before, at least. There’s a history here, the kind of history that five years of absence make him totally ignorant of, and Richard curses the fact that he’d been pulled out of the field for so long. He can’t make snap decisions without information and he can’t ask Jean-Marie what the _hell_ is going on with an audience in the room.

“You should be on our side! Honestly, sugar, we both know that _your_ people aren’t any happier about this,” she waves a hand, encompassing something that Richard can only guess at, “than we are.”

“You’ve gone rogue,” Jean-Marie says flatly, leaning over his knees. One of the armed men shifts uneasily, but Richard is the only one who seems to notice.

The woman barks out a laugh, vicious and mean, then holds a hand out imperiously to the man next to her. He hands her a gun with no hesitation, and she points the gun at Richard with the same sweetly condescending air that she’d entered the room with. Which is not the way he wanted this interrogation to go, to be honest.

“We’re protecting American interests,” she says, a glint of fanaticism in her eye. “Took an oath, sugar. Just because the bigwigs up top want to undermine the nation doesn’t mean we have to play along. You know how it is. Where’s my briefcase?”

“I couldn’t possibly tell you.” Jean-Marie keeps his eyes locked with hers, no indication that he’d noticed the gun in the first place. Richard is doing his best to pretend the same, even as cold sweat beads up on his back, focusing instead on the briefcase. He pulls the lists up in his mind’s eye, comparing them against the memorized cipher for any sort of clue to her plans.

“You could. And if you don’t, I _could_ shoot him.” Her thumb flicks the hammer back, click echoing in the cold stone room. It’s needlessly dramatic, like everything about this whole farce, but it _does_ send the message. And isn’t that wonderful? Not only is he not a threat, he’s a _damsel_ , a pawn to be used against Jean-Marie instead of another dangerous player in the game. His pride _stings_.

“Then do so,” Jean-Marie says, his gaze steady. “I have no use for him, and he doesn’t know enough about the nuclear weapons you’ve been stealing to carry a message for me.”

It hurts more than Richard thought it would. He doesn’t want _anything_ from Jean-Marie, other than maybe a hint of recognition that his betrayal had ruined Richard’s career, but it still hurts to be dismissed. He’s not even a useful pawn, because he never mattered to Jean-Marie. Not the way Jean-Marie had mattered to him. The bitter realization wraps a fist around his throat, keeps Richard silent when he might otherwise protest, but he tears his attention away from the wound to his pride and focuses on the mention of nuclear weapons instead.

The lat long coordinates. None of them are instantly recognizable, but he’d guess that the Soviets had been stockpiling them in various facilities for decades now—after all, the Americans have done the same. That’s one list figured out then, though the other still escapes him. Why target German towns when there are far better targets scattered throughout the world? Why _Eastern_ German towns, no less?

_We’re protecting American interests_ , she’d said, and they’d been in Munich. The French weren’t happy about the reunification and neither were Richard’s superiors, but the Americans wanted it, so the Americans—

There’s one guaranteed way to reignite tensions between the West and the East.

Richard blinks, the only outward sign he’s willing to give, but he can feel the way Jean-Marie tenses across the room. The gun is still pointed between his eyes, but the woman’s face is no longer gleeful, merely annoyed. He’s not the trump card she’d hoped he’d be, and she’s not sure whether killing him is worth the effort. At least, he hopes she’s thinking that—being killed for convenience doesn’t suit him any better than being killed for sentiment does.

“ _Well_ ,” she drags out the word, her finger tightening infinitesimally on the trigger as she uncocks the hammer. “We have some time. We’ll find it eventually, and maybe you lovebirds will make up and have a change of heart, hmm?”

Jean-Marie scoffs. Richard, despite trying not to show how much it hurts, lets out a bitter laugh of his own. Her men follow her as she sweeps out of the room and silence descends again once the metal door slams shut.

He waits exactly three minutes, counting out the seconds as he keeps an ear cocked for the sound of guards listening in. A quick scan of the room reveals no cameras, but that doesn’t outrule the possibility of hidden ones. The risk of being caught out collaborating was still less than the risk of doing nothing. And Richard is _so_ tired of being out of the loop.

“Alright,” Richard says into the emptiness between them, refusing to look away from the door, “talk.”

“Mr. Davies, you are a mannerless boor,” Jean-Marie says, but there’s a weary resignation to it. “Suzanne Collins is her name. You may have heard of her, you may not—she went rogue seven months ago. The CIA has been very tight-lipped about it, but word gets around.”

Gets around to people other than Richard, that is. He knows, intimately, the cooperative and sometimes hostile interpersonal lines of communication that agents in the field build; when one spy goes rogue, the rest of them try to find out _quickly_. And there is a vast chasm of difference between going turncoat and going rogue, which Richard considers in light of _protecting American interests_.

Europe smarts at the idea of a reunified Germany, but the Americans crave some sort of big, dramatic gesture of reconciliation. They are the heroes, after all, and heroes deserve parades and dramatics and the tearing down of walls. Anything to damn the Soviets, even as their allies in England and France sit up and protest.

For the first time, he wonders how the spies up in Berlin feel about their orders.

“She means to start a war,” he hears himself say, as if from a distance. Whatever they’d been drugged with wasn’t enough to keep them out for more than a few hours, because he’s not suffering the muscle weakness and nausea of a longer period unconscious. They’ll be near the border anyways, but it feels like a higher altitude, and this building’s heavy concrete is cold enough to suggest freezing weather outside. The Alps, he thinks.

“She means to reignite a war,” Jean-Marie corrects him, stretching his muscles out as he stands and inspects their makeshift prison. “Those coordinates are key to her plan, which I presume is the reason we’re still alive. I doubt she has a second copy. She’s paranoid.”

“The reason _you’re_ still alive.” Richard stands too, striding to the door and pressing his ear to it. The thick metal muffles sound, but he can hear the faint sound of guards talking not too far away. Good.

“Something of the sort. You have a plan for escape?”

Richard doesn’t answer as he steps back from the door. It’s not hard to find the rage again, the smarting pride at Jean-Marie’s long-ago betrayal amplified by his cold dismissal only a few minutes ago. Suzanne thinks Jean-Marie is her only chance at finding that briefcase, and he suspects she’ll want him alive for as long as possible.

Jean-Marie’s eyebrows shoot up at the expression on Richard’s face, but he thins his lips and nods when Richard jerks his chin towards the door in silent reminder of the guards outside. He even lets out an impressively realistic shout of fear and dismay when Richard tackles him to the floor, perhaps a little harder than necessary. He wants Jean-Marie to _bruise_ , act or no act, wants him to hurt in some small way as revenge for the massive injury he dealt Richard all those years ago.

To their credit, the guards are quick on their feet, slamming the door open and training their guns on Richard within seconds. They simply aren’t clever enough to account for Jean-Marie eeling his way out of Richard’s light grip, launching himself at them before they can react to the _true_ threat in the room.

A gunshot rings out a second too late, and then another one as a bullet chips concrete near Richard’s hand when he rolls out of the way. Jean-Marie wrestles a handgun off one guard, the other two clearly unsure where to aim—if they kill Jean-Marie, they won’t be able to find their briefcase, but Richard isn’t the one currently trying to maul them with his bare hands. That hesitation is all the opening he needs, launching himself at one of them and knocking the rifle towards the other as the guard panics and pulls the trigger.

One guard down, and Jean-Marie puts a bullet through the heart of his own. That leaves only Richard’s guard, who struggles furiously against the chokehold around his neck. It doesn’t take long for him to go limp, the rifle falling from his fingers as his body slumps. Richard lets him go, the guard’s head hitting the ground hard enough to concuss, and frowns when Jean-Marie shoots and winces.

“Are you hurt?” he asks, trying not to feel concerned and irritating himself because of it.

“Bruised,” Jean-Marie says dryly, flicking the safety on his stolen gun and tucking it in the back of his pants. “Not because of _them_.”

“You deserved it,” Richard tells him, leaning against the doorway to peek down the hall. He can hear running feet in the distance, but no one has made an appearance yet, and the signs on the wall in French and German helpfully point the way towards the exit. “Keep up.”

They move like ghosts through the facility, Richard taking point with Jean-Marie at his heels. He can’t tell if it’s an old nuclear plant or a research facility but either way, it’s abandoned and has been for some time—Suzanne must have stumbled upon it shortly after going rogue and made it her base of operations. As they get closer to the exit, they have to hide more often, in abandoned rooms and cleaning closets, the two of them barely breathing as they listen to boots on concrete. There aren’t many men working under her, not nearly as many as Richard first feared, but there are enough to be a problem. Certainly more of them than there are bullets in Jean-Marie’s gun.

Should have stolen one for himself, Richard reflects, though the other two guards had carried rifles, not handguns. A rifle was too conspicuous once they’d escaped, but he might have been able to use it on the way out.

On the other hand, they hadn’t been caught yet. The lack of gunshots hid their movements well.

English notes are appended to the signs as they near their destination. Living quarters, cafeteria, loading bay, supplies. With silent agreement, they turn towards the loading bay and Richard opens the door into absolutely frigid air. There are three covered trucks under the dubious shelter of the roof and a pair of snowmobiles near the bay doors, their runners half-coated with snow. Trucks would force them onto the roads, but if they don’t know where they are—

“I know this facility,” Jean-Marie says, surprise coloring his voice. “I hadn’t realized how important it was.”

“You can find your way down the mountain?” Richard shoots him a sharp look, making his way down the steps to the snowmobiles. Their suits won’t be enough to make it down the mountain on foot and being on the road is begging for them to get caught. But if they could make it down the mountain in something else…

“There’s a cabin, one of ours, maybe an hour’s ride from here.” Jean-Marie passes him, unfastening the fuel line from one snowmobile before throwing its keys out into the snow. The second one he sits on, patting the seat behind himself. “We can make it there, then part ways.”

“Part—” Richard starts to say before he’s cut off by the slam of a door being kicked open. They’re out of time.

He throws himself onto the back of the snowmobile, wrapping his arms tight around Jean-Marie’s waist and seething. It roars to life underneath him, Jean-Marie gunning forward as Suzanne’s men race to catch up, and Richard hisses as the trees around them explode into splinters from the gunfire. He dares to look back only once, when the facility is almost out of sight, and sees her blood red hair blazing as she watches them flee.

* * *

There’s maybe half a tank of gas left in the snowmobile, but Richard doesn’t go back outside to check. However much or little there is, it should be enough to get them to Leuk, if he’s reading this map correctly; they can’t be more than twenty minutes outside town. From there it’s a simple matter of getting to a bigger city, one with an embassy he can get in touch with. This information is too important to sit on.

Jean-Marie is uncharacteristically quiet, cleaning his stolen guns with an intensity that Richard is loath to break. Their history and the cruel words in that little cell sit between them, a rift that is intolerably deep and broad. He’d thought that there was nothing more Jean-Marie could say that would hurt him, but he’d thought wrong. Richard won’t make that mistake again.

He concentrates on mapping their route instead, a map rolled out underneath him as he calculates the time it would take to get to Geneva. If they slip into one of the baggage cars, they won’t need to provide documentation, and should they be discovered he is carrying enough francs to make any employee turn a blind eye. Much as he might like to return to Munich and retrieve the briefcase himself, it is safer to pass the information on to his handler and let his leadership make that choice; he can pass on enough, between the memorized list of locations and his estimation of the cipher, that any other agent should be able to break the code. And if they can’t, they can surely send it on ahead of themselves.

But time is of the essence here. Suzanne, with her gleaming smile and predatory eye, won’t be far behind once she learns of their escape. This plan to incite tensions might require specific timing, but he can’t put it past her to move the time frame up.

A clatter of bullets on the ground pulls him out of his thoughts and Richard turns to snap something at Jean-Marie, but the words die in his throat. Jean-Marie’s face is grey, his hands shaking as he stares down at the mess uncomprehendingly, his handsome brow furrowed like he cannot believe that he’d fumbled so basic a task. Richard can’t believe it either, but he’s also much quicker on the draw, leaping across the room to yank Jean-Marie’s jacket off and inspect his shirt below it.

His hand, when he presses it to Jean-Marie’s side, comes back damp and dark with blood. Swearing under his breath, Richard starts fighting his way through Jean-Marie’s buttons, the Frenchman alarmingly passive under his touch.

“So eager to see me undressed again?” Jean-Marie asks, and his voice is still whole and wry at the very least. Hopefully he hasn’t lost a critical amount of blood.

“You’re a bastard and an idiot,” Richard informs him, finally getting the shirt undone. It’s not a terribly deep wound, and it won’t be fatal unless Jean-Marie continues to _ignore_ it; the only reason it’s bled so freely is likely because they’d never stopped to wrap it. Even now, it sluggishly spills through Richard’s fingers, edges of it scabbed over and the clots half-formed. Barely even a graze from one of the bullets Jean-Marie had so deftly dodged.

“You didn’t say ‘no’,” he murmurs, tipping forward until his pale face rests against Richard’s shoulder. Richard ignores it, just like he ignores the bright, hot thing in his gut, never quite certain if the rage or longing will win out. Right now, he leans towards rage.

“Shut up.” Richard pushes him back against the table Jean-Marie used to hold his gun cleaning equipment, finally pulling his hand away. His fingers are red and sticky, new blood smeared over old, leaving stains as he breaks open the first aid kit this safehouse is stocked with. It’s mostly full still, iodine and gauze and wrappings all neatly organized within it. At least one thing is going right.

Jean-Marie’s eyes are shut when he glances back, but his hand is also pressed firmly to his side, his shirt gathered in a bundle to help stem the weak flow of blood. Since he’s cognizant enough to manage that much, Richard takes the chance to find a towel under the sink, washing his hands and then wetting the terrycloth before coming back over. It won’t be perfect field surgery, and he thinks that stitches might do more ill than good right now, but at least he can get it clean and wrapped. For now, it will have to do.

His fingers are brusque as he wipes the blood off, moving Jean-Marie’s hand out of the way. The wound opens up further, but at least it’s no longer caked with sweat and grime and other unmentionables; once it’s as clean as Richard thinks he can get it, he wipes it down again with iodine, ignoring the way blood tries to well up again, then presses the layers of gauze over it. They will have to get to a hospital, but this will buy him the time to do so. And Jean-Marie is at least cognizant enough of his surroundings to help wrap bandages around his middle, having shrugged off his shirt entirely at some point.

“You realize this makes my life harder, right?” Richard hates the way bruises smear under Jean-Marie’s eyes, hates the way his hands want to shake at the sight of blood on his skin. After everything the man has done, he deserves _nothing_ from Richard—but Richard cannot help worrying about him anyways. Foolish. 

“Well, I did not expect to make it _easier_ ,” Jean-Marie says, leaning against the table, his body trembling. They’ll be lucky if he doesn’t catch a fever and Richard is not feeling terribly lucky right now.

“We can’t stay.” He turns away, hunting through the storage in this safehouse for something that will fit Jean-Marie. He finds a sweater eventually, which will have to do, and a new undershirt besides. Neither will fit perfectly, but underneath his suit jacket they will look fine; the important thing is maintaining an appearance of normalcy. “You need a doctor and I need to contact my superiors. There’s trains leaving out of Leuk every couple of hours, so we’ll catch one of those and ride it to Geneva.”

“Mm. I have a safehouse in Geneva. The usual place.” Jean-Marie catches the clothing when Richard tosses it to him, pulling it on before bending over to grab his jacket. He’s still grey and his movements are sluggish, but there’s a small bottle of painkillers sitting on the table that hadn’t been there a moment ago. He should hold for a while longer.

Richard wants to _shake him_ , he’s so angry, but that’s a pointless emotion to have. Not that Jean-Marie doesn’t deserve it, but the anger isn’t productive—it’s the wounded, protective, prideful sort, the kind that Richard might have had five years ago before Jean-Marie betrayed him so thoroughly. He shouldn’t _care_ about Jean-Marie, about the blood loss and possibility of infection, about the way Jean-Marie’s wry humor was so tired but so familiar, about the fact that he might have to leave Jean-Marie behind if the other spy slows him down too much. And yet Richard simply can’t stop feeling, his emotions a snarled mess of barbed wire hurting him as much as anyone else when he goes to untangle them.

Damn the man for being here and damn him again for getting shot.

A bright glint catches his eye, silver dangling from Jean-Marie’s neck as he laboriously pulls on his suit jacket. The neck of the sweater is low enough and wide enough that the necklace is visible now when it hadn’t been earlier, and Richard had been too distracted by the wound to notice it when Jean-Marie’s chest was bare.

He swallows his anger and turns away to plan their route down the mountain.

Leuk is not very far away and they make it to the outskirts in good time. They leave the snowmobile behind, Jean-Marie’s fingers careful as he hotwires a car for them to drive to the train station, and Richard does his best not to worry. That they haven’t been followed yet has him on edge—it’s too much to hope that Suzanne and her cronies haven’t clued into the direction they were heading.

Jean-Marie has him on edge too, but for very different reasons. The clumsiness from earlier hasn’t made a return, but Richard is certain that’s because Jean-Marie moves much slower now. His skin is still pale, the bruises under his eyes too deep, and there’s the slightest tremble in his hands when he waves for Richard to take the driver’s seat. He’s not doing well at all, and Richard can’t tell if it’s blood loss or infection that makes him quiet and listless.

There’s little he can do for either, so he concentrates on getting them to the station instead. They don’t buy tickets, even though there’s enough francs between them; Jean-Marie eyeballs the length of the train and makes a judgement on where the baggage car is. He’s off by one, but it’s no issue—they slip into the car in front of it before any of the workers notice their movements, Richard hunting out a spot between several large boxes of freight that they can hide in. Most of the car is filled with checked bags, the rest filled with prospective deliveries, but there’s a small alcove between two of the largest boxes that fits a man of his height just barely. It’s a tight squeeze for the both of them, but once they’re settled in, they’re invisible.

It means keeping Jean-Marie tucked up against his side though, their bodies touching from shoulder to hip, all the way down the length of their curled up legs. Too intimate by half, in a way that makes Richard tense.

The minutes pass slowly. Workers come into the baggage car twice with the bags of late-running customers but never spot them; eventually, the train rumbles louder, the car vibrating as it begins to trundle down the tracks. They have a few hours trapped in the darkness before they get to Geneva and Jean-Marie’s safehouse.

Jean-Marie’s face presses into the crook of his neck, skin hot and dry and dangerously close. There’s no room in the baggage car for Richard to get up and stalk away; there’s barely enough room for the both of them to fit without getting crushed by something in the first place. And his traitorous body wraps an arm around Jean-Marie’s waist, keeps him close in a mockery of the way they sat so many years ago, longs for him as keenly as it had the day he’d gotten his heart broken.

“Do you remember Bucharest?” Jean-Marie rasps, one too-warm hand curling around Richard’s hard enough to bruise.

Of course he remembers Bucharest. Richard’s memory is one of his best assets, always has been, and it is a boon and a curse in equal measure. He remembers the flat he rented in Drumul Taberei, the streets he walked as he enmeshed himself in the local community, the way spring smelled and the touch of Jean-Marie’s hand against his wrist, one French agent introducing himself to the British one in his territory.

In one memory, Jean-Marie is sprawled on his bed, or bent over his desk, or frowning down at something he’s failing to cook on the stove, occupying the space in Richard’s flat as easily as he occupied space in Richard’s heart. He swings from sardonic to crushingly sincere, mocks their peers even as he grudgingly respects some of the work they do, brings his paperwork to Richard’s flat and occasionally invites him back to his own. He buys them a pair of matching necklaces, engraved with their initials and small enough to be hidden easily. He tells Richard that he loves him.

And in another memory, he peers at the correspondence Richard has spent all night decodings, letting out a low whistle as he realizes the way Richard discovered the Russian cypher. He asks if he can get a copy to send onto his own people, smiles when Richard agrees with the caveat that Jean-Marie waits for him to pass the information up, kisses Richard on the cheek before leaving early in the morning when all his neighbors are asleep.

He sends the information back to DGSE before Richard can get in touch with his superiors. It turns out there were French assets in the middle of it all, and in their haste to pull their people out, France destroys any chance for him to get meaningful information on the Russians and their operation.

Richards remembers, so clearly, the office he got his dressing down in. Remembers the moment it got out _how_ Jean-Marie got his hands on Richard’s decoded correspondence. Remembers the crippling shame and terrible relief when he’s told that they won’t be decommissioning him based on his _proclativities_ but they will be keeping him close to home for the time being. Remembers it all with the same clarity as he does the way Romania’s sun catches on Jean-Marie’s lashes, and he hates that he can’t purge any of it from his memories because his memory is one of the few things he can be proud of.

He doesn’t reply, his grip tight around Jean-Marie’s waist, and after a moment Jean-Marie sighs. “I remember Bucharest. I remember the way you used to smile. You never smile anymore—I did that to you.”

“I smile,” Richard says, unclenching his jaw long enough to bite the words out. He doesn’t want to hear this, Jean-Marie reminiscing about the past as if he were dying, as if he weren’t the one who ruined everything in the first place.

“You are a liar, but I forgive you.” Jean-Marie’s fingers are brutally tight around Richard’s hand and he shifts fretfully next to him. “I missed you, Richard. Every day after I left Romania, I missed you.”

“Seems a bit late for that, don’t you think?” Richard can’t stop the bitterness from seeping into his words, doesn’t even want to try. He wasn’t the one that ruined things, even if his traitorous heart cries out for Jean-Marie’s return, longs to hear him beg and come crawling back. He can’t take that risk again. He can’t.

Jean-Marie falls silent next to him, breathing soft but rapid. It might be simpler to just leave him behind when they get to Geneva, especially since he’s been slowly degrading over the last hour. He needs to move fast, inform his people that the Americans have a rogue splinter cell that’s intending to use nuclear weapons to heat up the Cold War again, get that briefcase full of documents out of Suzanne’s hands before she can use it. She wouldn’t be so desperate to find it if she knew where her weapons were; that list of coordinates is crucial and only Richard knows for certain all of them.

He’ll be seen as a raving lunatic if he doesn’t handle this just right. The briefcase is a good place to start—intelligence is intelligence, even if his own motives are questionable. The American cipher helps too, because he’s figured out the one they were using (older, already broken, possibly because the rogue group couldn’t get their hands on the more recent ones) and that adds weight to his case. If he could just prove her involvement…

“I shouldn’t have done it,” Jean-Marie says, pulling his hand away from Richard’s. The air on his skin is cold where Jean-Marie’s hand was feverishly hot.

“Done wha—” Richard starts to ask, lost in the problem of revealing Suzanne’s plans, but he’s cut off when Jean-Marie slides into his lap with slightly more grace than his condition would imply.

“I should have waited for you to pass that information up the chain. Our contacts… I didn’t expect the Director to be so clumsy extracting them.” Jean-Marie’s fingers bury themselves in Richard’s hair, small branding irons that leave their mark across his scalp as Jean-Marie presses their foreheads together. “I was a fool.”

“Jean-Marie,” he says, before stopping at that. There is something achingly familiar in the way Jean-Marie sits in his lap, the curve of his torso over Richard’s chest, the press of his too warm cheek against Richard’s own. Never in a space quite this tight, but his flat had been tiny and Jean-Marie was a creature made of touch—how many times had they curled up like this? How many times had he let Jean-Marie blow smoke into his face, the cigarette held between his deft, slender fingers like a taunt? How many times had he stolen it, just to hear Jean-Marie laugh and beg to have it back?

“If I could go back in time, I would change things. I would do it over again, just to stop myself,” Jean-Marie whispers, his fingers trembling in Richard’s hair as his body slumps more heavily. When Richard slides a hand under the sweater, the bandages are still dry, but Jean-Marie’s body is like an oven radiating heat.

He swallows, throat dry, and wraps his arms more firmly around Jean-Marie’s body. Impossible to hold onto the anger, even with his damnably perfect memory, when Jean-Marie is plastered against him in misery. “You never took off the necklace.”

“How could I?” Jean-Marie’s voice is a ruin, from fever or regret or possibly both. “You are my everything, Richard.”

There’s nothing else he can say to that. Richard never took off the necklace either.

* * *

Jean-Marie slumps against him as Richard hurries him through Geneva’s streets, his grip on Richard’s jacket iron tight. He can walk but only just—his skin still burns, sweat dampening his shirt under Richard’s arm, but his eyes are clear again. Pained, but clear.

He needs a hospital, but they need to pass on Suzanne’s scheme even more. Jean-Marie isn’t able to give Richard clear directions, swearing under his breath as he struggles to remember the street numbers, but Richard knows his mind and the way it works. Paquis is not a neighborhood that plays well with tourists, it’s location near Cornavin notwithstanding; it is cheap, it is seedy, and it is hostile towards outsiders. Perfect for Jean-Marie’s safe house.

Carrying a clearly injured man through Geneva’s streets has its own problems. He’s on high alert, scanning not only for the building numbers—Jean-Marie’s tics are more obvious than he knows, and Richard has never seen fit to tell him that—but for enemies as well. Some of the locals eyeball him in return, but they’re smart enough to know a fellow predator when they see one. And none of them have the distinctive height and brashness of covert American agents.

Maybe, if they’re lucky, Suzanne has no idea where they’ve gone. His luck thus far has been miserable, but Richard can’t help but hope anyways. There are only so many places to flee from Leuk, and it had been the closest major civilian center from the old facility they’d been brought to, but perhaps Suzanne’s mad scheming rotted the rest of her brain as well. Maybe they’ll get to Jean-Marie’s safe house, he’ll call home with reams of evidence and give them directions to the briefcase for more, Jean-Marie will get a doctor, and everything will be fine.

The sick feeling of dread in his stomach suggests otherwise.

Richard spots the building he was looking for, Jean-Marie’s fist tightening on his jacket a few seconds later in confirmation. He hisses, “There, third floor, toward the back—there is an escape route.”

That much is obvious, Richard doesn’t tell him in return, instead hastening to the grate blocking the building off. Once functional, perhaps, but opportunistic tenants or street sleepers have rendered the lock inoperable. They’re able to slip inside without issue, Jean-Marie’s feet stumbling on the first of the steps up.

Richard was so focused on their destination that he missed the shadow of movement in the hallway off the second landing. His only warning is Jean-Marie jerking out of his grip, staggering backwards a few steps as he fumbles for his gun. The heavy impact of a body into his own replaces Jean-Marie’s heat, hands grabbing for Richard’s limbs as he slams into the stairway railing.

It holds, but only just. He tears an arm free from his assailant, slamming his elbow into their head as they choke on a pained groan. A man, based on the adam’s apple that he punches next, sending him staggering backwards as he clutches at his neck frantically in an attempt to breathe. Richard doesn’t spare him a second thought, already spinning to meet his next opponent, knocking their knife away before it can slice over his vulnerable throat.

They are dead silent and trying to make this look like a mugging—that, at least, he can understand. The fewer authorities paying attention, the less likely anyone important will realize what had happened. Two foreign nationals mugged in a seedy part of town is ordinary; two foreign nationals gunned down with precision by American firearms is not.

No time to check where Jean-Marie is, not when he’s focusing on keeping his skin unmarred by the blade. Richard doesn’t trust it to be free of poison, doesn’t trust it to be safe to touch with bare skin, and his opponent is clever enough to give him no opportunities to attack back. He can only hope that they hadn’t struck Jean-Marie first, can only hope that Jean-Marie’s obvious infirmity keeps him safe and nonthreatening.

The knife slides over his jacket sleeve, splitting the silk easily but missing his skin. Richard’s heel hits the edge of the railing, nearly tripping him again, and his opponent’s eyes gleam with triumph seconds before the crack of a gunshot splits the silence between them.

In the ringing silence that follows, the man crumples. There’s a hole solidly through his skull, the bullet buried in the plaster of the wall past the landing. A soft clatter announces the fall of the knife, and Richard kicks it well out of reach on habit.

Jean-Marie stands there, grey and shaking, using the wall to keep himself upright. His hand is perfectly steady however, his finger resting lightly over the trigger guard now that his shot is spent, and his eyes are clear.

“No one will question it,” Jean-Marie says, his voice rough. “If we leave the gun behind, it will be a quarrel between men. The residents of this building know to keep their mouths shut.”

“Right.” Richard edges closer, very carefully wrapping his fingers around Jean-Marie’s wrist and tugging the gun from his hand. The strength leaves Jean-Marie’s body all at once, and he slumps heavily against the wall as Richard bends down to inspect his first attacker. He’s well and truly suffocated by now, his face slowly purpling as Richard gently wraps the man’s fingers around the gun. Stolen off a guard in Suzanne’s little hideaway in the first place; it can’t be traced to either of them.

Jean-Marie’s eyes are shut, his hand pressed to his side as his grimaces in pain. Richard doesn’t hesitate before picking him up again, hauling Jean-Marie’s arm over his shoulders as he half-carries, half-drags him up the last flight of stairs. He doesn’t want to let go again, doesn’t want to let Jean-Marie slip from his grip just in case this time is the last time—he is terrified, terrified more than he is angry, and he can’t shake that bright, horrible fear that Jean-Marie had died in the middle of his fistfight, after all the work Richard has gone through to bring him home.

There’s a key painted into the plaster next to the door, which Richard digs out with the nails of his free hand. The flat is reminiscent of Jean-Marie’s old one back in Bucharest, the one he’d only seen a few times but remembers with painful clarity. There’s a tiny counter with a stove and even smaller table, a rickety desk shoved up next to the window, and a bed tucked into the space next to the shut bathroom door. It’s barely enough room for one man, much less two, but Richard lets Jean-Marie fall onto the bed before turning towards the desk.

Geneva must have been Jean-Marie’s base of operations as he peeled apart Suzanne’s schemes. There’s a corkboard with a map pinned up, her movements marked in red thread and pins, Jean-Marie’s sloppy handwriting marking dates and suspected plans. Papers are scattered on the desk too, his arcane filing system as familiar as the feel of his body against Richard’s, and it’s easy enough to find all the evidence he needs of wrongdoing, even before the damning briefcase came into play.

It would reek of obsession, were it anyone else, but they are paid to be obsessed. Richard rests a hand over Jean-Marie’s scheduler, the event at Neues Rathaus circled in blue pen. He must have rushed to get to Munich in time to intercept the handoff.

“I have to make a call,” Richard says, even as fear beats heavy in his chest. Jean-Marie needs a doctor, a real doctor, and every second matters. But he can’t let that sentiment override his good sense. Not again.

No matter how much he desperately wants to.

“Make it,” Jean-Marie replies, voice muffled by his own blankets. When Richard glances back, Jean-Marie has stripped out of his jacket, the sweater pulled up off his head, but the rest of his clothes are still on. The bandages are spotted with blood and the yellow of something worse, and it’s clear that he decided against looking underneath them.

Richard swallows his heart and picks up the plastic phone off its receiver. The faster he passes this information on, the faster Suzanne can be caught. And with her caught, Jean-Marie will be safe.

There is silence on the line as the call picks up. This is a number no one should know, and he is calling from a number that isn’t in their databases. Richard clears his throat and begins, “This is Richard Davies, calling on an unsecured line. I have critical information about an attempt to destabilize the talks in Berlin with false-flag nuclear attacks in East Germany. There is a briefcase in Munich with coordinates…”

* * *

Jean-Marie groans, fumbling around in the sheets as he starts to wake up. 

“If you’re looking for that folder, I put it back on your desk,” Richard tells him, perched at the table with a pile of paperwork of his own. The worst part of this clusterfuck is, as always, the documentation that follows. At least he hasn’t been called back to Munich yet.

The incoherent mumbling that follows is interrupted by a jaw-cracking yawn and Jean-Marie drags himself out of bed to make coffee. His wound is livid pink with healing skin, but it’s no longer inflamed and they’d taken the bandages off for good the night before; after having the source of infection excised and a round of antibiotics, Jean-Marie has dodged sepsis by the skin of his teeth. Richard tries not to think about how grateful he is for that fact.

“You’re a busybody.” His necklace gleams dully around his throat as Jean-Marie tips sideways, burying his lips in Richard’s hair. It’s dangerously domestic, this moment mapping over the sense memory of every moment like it from years ago, but Richard only leans into the curve of Jean-Marie’s body, smoothing a hand up over his side.

“I don’t have anything else to occupy me for the moment, more like,” Richard says, setting his pen down. It’s been a week and Jean-Marie can’t stop touching him, just like he can’t stop touching in return, trying to burn this moment into his memory too. “They’re not sending me back to Munich and I’m at loose ends.”

Jean-Marie hums, his breath brushing through Richard’s hair, and says nothing. This is not Bucharest, where both of them have been stationed for some indeterminable amount of time; Richard will have to leave soon, called back home for debriefing and possibly a round of castigation, and Jean-Marie’s cover in Geneva is blown. They don’t have forever. They barely have any time at all.

But he wants, like he’s wanted for five years, to stretch this moment out endlessly anyways, to keep Jean-Marie close and pretend like the world has stopped spinning underneath their feet.

“I’ll give you my number,” Richard says, before he can stop his fool mouth from opening. “The one to my place in London. They might not let me back on the mainland until this mess dies down, but I’d like to know where you’re stationed anyways.”

He can feel Jean-Marie’s lips curve against his scalp, and there’s a terrible sort of joy in Jean-Marie’s voice when he says, “I’d like that.”


End file.
